Inhuman Read online

  Contents

  Title page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  - Chapter 1

  This is me

  - Chapter 2

  Stupid dog

  - Chapter 3

  The dog catcher

  - Chapter 4

  Chubby McFattycakes

  - Chapter 5

  Dog farts

  - Chapter 6

  Checking on the neighbor

  - Chapter 7

  A bedtime story

  - Chapter 8

  Viva Piñata

  - Chapter 9

  More unwelcome guests

  - Chapter 10

  ISAIAH 26:19-20

  - Chapter 11

  Sara's story

  - Chapter 12

  Learning gun talk

  - Chapter 13

  More fucking people

  - Chapter 14

  Action Jackson

  - Chapter 15

  Fah who for-aze

  - Chapter 16

  Nocturnal emissions

  - Chapter 17

  Time to leave

  - Chapter 18

  DIY

  - Chapter 19

  Dog farts and defying gravity

  - Chapter 20

  The ex

  - Chapter 21

  Once bitten

  - Chapter 22

  Pillow talk

  - Chapter 23

  Bad meatloaf

  - Chapter 24

  Midnight snack

  - Chapter 25

  An old friend

  - Chapter 26

  Jack is a penis looker

  - Chapter 27

  The blue fairy returns

  - Chapter 28

  The runners

  - Chapter 29

  Meth lab slumber party

  - Chapter 30

  Dust in the sunlight

  - Chapter 31

  I hate Bret Favre

  - Chapter 32

  Leaving again

  - Chapter 33

  Car troubles

  - Chapter 34

  Terry the terrible

  - Chapter 35

  A lovely day for a ride

  - Chapter 36

  The zoo

  - Chapter 37

  Reunited and it feels sooo good

  - Chapter 38

  Smoking in the boys room

  - Chapter 39

  Rex makes a friend

  - Chapter 40

  Surrounded

  - Chapter 41

  I love it when a plan comes together

  - Chapter 42

  Assembling an army of our own

  - Chapter 43

  Releasing the kitties

  - Chapter 44

  Hell breaks loose

  - Chapter 45

  Hell revealed

  - Chapter 46

  Losing everything

  - Chapter 47

  The last chapter

  Inhuman

  Todd C. Feren

  Inhuman

  Todd C. Feren

  Copyright © 2015 by Todd C. Feren. All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, businesses, events or locales is purely coincidental. Reproduction in whole or part of this publication without express written consent is strictly prohibited. Cover art by Jason Murphy. Find more information on his work at www.jasonmurphy.net

  Click or visit:

  ToddFeren.com

  For my family, friends, and most importantly Wally, Seymour, and Rex.

  I remember the news leading up to the zombie outbreak. I remember the hungry look on the reporter’s eyes as he delivered the story. The tremor of excitement that sat just under his forced, somber tone as he read the words “eating the flesh of the living” was palpable. The entire time he read the story, he had an expression of concern and disbelief, but I could tell that beneath his disgusted veneer, this was the type of story he had waited for. This was the type of reporting that would make him famous. This was the story of the century, and when it all blows over, as we all thought it would, he would have a nice, cushy job covering the national news. His mouth was watering with the prospect of being out of his small town market. Gone would be the days of covering local property line disputes and high school football scores.

  While the rest of the viewing audience saw a scared news reporter courageously facing a living nightmare, I saw the falsity of his emotions. Have you ever heard the expression, “never bullshit a bullshitter”? I’m the biggest bullshitter around.

  Before zombies turned the world to shit, there was something called the National Institute of Mental Health. They estimated that approximately twenty-six percent of the American population had some sort of diagnosed mental illness. What the hell, right? More than one quarter of the population was "mentally ill." Slightly more than one in four. Remember your birthday party the year before society went down? Twenty people in your house all laughing and drinking together. You had five mentally fucked up people in your house, touching your things and doing god-knows-what to your flatware. Granted, there are degrees of mental fucked-up-ness. Whether it’s the overwhelming number of people who are medicated with antidepressants, or the more severe crazies who gobble up antipsychotic medicines to keep them from becoming a threat to themselves or society. Then there’s the PTSD nut jobs who are one dog fart away from reliving some glorious day from the battlefield in your local McDonald’s.

  Either way, it was pretty easy to see that the factories manufacturing the medicine that this twenty-six percent so desperately needed would no longer be cranking out the drugs. Forget about the zombies. Just imagine the unmedicated psychos in this world running free with no police or societal laws to stop them.

  What about me? My name is Jeffrey Wayne.

  I have what you would call antisocial personality disorder. Sounds fun, right? Rebellious? It sounds like something James Dean had. Before it had that most spectacular title, my kind was called a different name.

  Sociopath- (sōsēōˌpaTH)

  noun

  Antisocial personality disorder is a mental health condition in which a person has a long-term pattern of manipulating, exploiting, or violating the rights of others. This behavior is often criminal. The sociopath has no empathy, and can lack even the most basic of emotions. They often have no moral compass, and feel no remorse for their actions. They are master manipulators, and are hard to identify due to their ability to blend in with society.

  Still pretty cool, right?

  Symptoms

  A person with antisocial personality disorder may:

  Be able to act witty and charming

  Be good at flattery and manipulating other people's emotions

  Break the law repeatedly

  Disregard the safety of self and others

  Have problems with substance abuse

  Lie, steal, and fight often

  Not show guilt or remorse

  Often be angry or arrogant

  Be lacking in empathy and unable to connect with other people.

  Now that we got the clinical definition out of the way, let me tell you, I have serious issues with this list. It's chock-full of assumptions and stereotypes. Like the gentle snowflake, monsters like me are unique in every way. Sure, some of it is accurate, but I’ve done my very best to try and differentiate myself from the rest of my ilk.

  I first learned of my condition when I was just a little boy. I noticed big differences between the other children and myself. I also had this uncanny ability to get people to do things for me, so I did what any other above average intelligence monster would do. I read everything I could on the subject until I was able to diagnose my condition. I read how my pattern of behavior woul
d wind up putting me in jail. I read how easily I could become addicted to alcohol or drugs, which in turn could lead me to jail. I read how I would break the law to fulfill this burning desire to reject authority, also leading me to jail. I also grew up watching cable television, and I was assured of one thing: men get raped in jail.

  I did not want to go to jail.

  So I continued my manipulations and got better at pretending to be normal. I vowed to be a different kind of sociopath. I was self-aware, and nothing could stop me. My true self would lurk in the shadows of my mind. He was the brains, and he would plot the course. My job was to blend in, and I do a very, very good job at blending in.

  For someone like me, camouflage is looking as much like you as is humanly possible. To do this, I've become a very astute observer of people and their actions. I see the way people smile. Real smiles, like the big toothy grin you plaster across your face that makes you look like a giant moron after you score a three-pointer to win the game. I also see fake smiles, like the tight pressed grin that people put on when they run into an acquaintance in the grocery store. I can see real anger versus the false bravado that so many put on to try and get their way. I see the slow burning of a blush when a woman sees something, or someone, she wants. I can see the way a man, who is going against his conscience, shuffles his feet slightly, or the slight raised pitch in the voice of someone who is lying.

  Then there's love. Oddly, love is the most foreign idea to me, but by far the easiest to duplicate. Controlled and slightly erratic breathing with moist eyes and a hint of a whisper in every word spoken while turning your head the tiniest degree to one side like you are waiting for a kiss is the easiest way to fake that intimate contact with another. There are a thousand different subtle interactions for every situation, and I've made it my job to master each and every one.

  Not to pat myself on the back too hard, but I do a damn fine human impression, and I've done it for a very long time. But, for as long as I've worn my human costume, and as long as I've perfected my camouflage to blend in perfectly, just under the surface of my illusion of humanity lies something dark and cold. Something so perfectly sterile and calculating it could only be described in one word… Me.

  At a very young age, I noticed there was something wrong with me. I saw a little girl in school crying after a school counselor came into the class to tell her that both her parents had died in a car accident. She was hysterical. She had snot shooting out like jets from her nose while tears seemed to squirt down her face like a broken windshield wiper fluid dispenser. I remember thinking, What's the big deal? It's not like you were in the car, too.

  But then, when some of the other children found out, they started crying, too. They went to her and hugged her, and held her hand to let her know she was not alone.

  Five-year-old me sat coloring a purple turtle (I know turtles aren’t purple, but at five years old, a purple turtle was my way of rebellion against a green turtle society).

  The entire rest of the class went to little Cindy O’Malley's side to comfort her, leaving me alone at the crafts table. It was then that I felt exposed. I felt like I didn't belong. I wasn't sure why everyone did what they did, or why it didn't really matter to me.

  That night, while I laid in bed, I tried my very hardest to sympathize or empathize with little Cindy O’Malley. I envisioned my parents being eaten by a lion. I visualized it as best as I could. I even added myself into the scene, watching as they begged me for help. I didn't feel the need to lift a single finger. After that scenario ended, I imagined my parents in a car falling off of the side of a cliff like I’d seen the roadrunner fall so many times before. I found myself flying like Superman, and I followed the car all the way to the desert ground where instead of a cartoony "poof,” I saw my parents mangled in a hunk of twisted and burning steel.

  I felt nothing. So I added wolves to the scene, picking them apart while they screamed and called out for me. Still, nothing. Then, I imagined the entire planet wiped away by an angry alien race. They left me on the planet completely alone. Not another soul was left behind with me (if you believe in such a thing as a soul). At that moment, I felt something strange. I felt powerful. I was the only person alive on the planet. I could stay up as late as I wanted. I could eat Pop Tarts for dinner and never brush my teeth. Then, my imaginary aliens came down and offered to return every other person to the planet if I would only say “please”. Instead of pleading for the return of a single person, I mimicked a hand gesture I saw my father do many times…

  I gave them the finger.

  The next day in school, little Cindy O’Malley was nowhere to be seen. The class returned to normal, and I began to think about things. The attention that Cindy got for her parents careless driving was amazing. Could I deliver a fraction of her performance to garner a small amount of the attention she received? I had questions that a normal five-year-old wouldn't have. I raised my hand and told the teacher I had to relieve myself. I believe the word I used was "tinkle." I walked out of the classroom and started down the hall. At that moment, an older boy from the fifth grade in jean shorts, a blue shirt with a Transformer on it, and a neon baseball cap walked out of the bathroom. As he passed me, he smiled and said,

  "Hey, dude!"

  After he turned the corner, I did some calculations. I dug deep into the recesses of my tiny, inhuman brain. I tried my best to recall Cindy's twisted facial expression. I remembered quite vividly the struggles she had breathing, the sharp gasps of air she took in-between deep sobs. I held my breath to make my face red and began to hyperventilate. My eyes watered, and before I knew it, tears began to form in the corners of my eyes. With my left hand, I reached over to my right cheek and took a handful of skin, I pinched it so hard that it immediately began to swell. I mussed and pulled on my hair until it looked like I had just woke up. I untucked my shirt and pulled on the collar to stretch it just like the scene I had laid out in my mind. I then opened the classroom door and ran straight to the teacher, trying my best to make the same painful sounds I heard from Cindy just yesterday. The look of concern on her face let me know my performance was passable.

  I knew for a fact that my teacher, Mrs. Corman, didn't have any children of her own. She would always say how proud she was of each child in her class, and she would brag about all of the kids in school like they were her very own.

  I could see terror in her eyes, and I tried my hardest to stay in character and not smile because my ruse was working. A whisper in the back of my brain emerged from the shadows of my subconscious, and I repeated the single word with the same tone and timbre as I heard it.

  "Mommy..." I whispered in her ear.

  She began to sob wildly. To her, I was a scared child who mistook a woman of authority for his mother. But a biological child was something that she could never have. I didn't know that at the time. It wasn't until several years later, when I overheard her husband, another teacher at the school, mention to one of his peers that he and his wife were unable to conceive.

  I'm not sure how all of this came to me at such a young age. Perhaps this instinct inside of monsters like me is a natural evolutionary improvement to help ensure the survival of my kind.

  When I whispered "Mommy" in her ear, I instinctively knew it would trigger different emotions inside of her. I wasn't sure how she would react, but I knew it would be a learning experience for me. She squeezed me close to her chest, ran down the hall to the principal’s office, and then they asked me who attacked me in the hallway.

  The telltale red mark on my face was a sure punch from someone else, and my tousled hair and stretched-out shirt was a sign that I struggled and tried to get away. I described the boy in the jean shorts and Transformer t-shirt, and I told them that he took my lunch money.

  Mrs. Corman began to burn with rage. She stormed out of the office, and went from room to room until she found the "guilty" boy. I found out later he was suspended for five days. He denied the attack adamantly, and even cried as he call
ed his father to come pick him up. I remember hearing Mrs. Corman tell the boy:

  "You put on quite a show with your little crocodile tears."

  This boy in the jean shorts and Transformer t-shirt did nothing other than smile at me, and say, “hey, dude,” so why did I get such satisfaction from knowing that he was being punished because of my lie? Furthermore, I was pretty sure his father was going to punish him worse than the five day suspension the school gave him.

  But there I was. A five-year-old that watched every piece fall into the places that I wanted them to. I had absolute control over the situation. I made my teacher cry, and I made a school official believe something I made up out of thin air as though it were the gospel truth. I even made someone else's very real tears appear fake to a grown up. I got a boy suspended using nothing more than my will.

  I had the power.

  Now, instead of the soggy peanut butter and jelly sandwich my mother actually made me, the school bought me hot pizza from the cafeteria and a large chocolate milk. You may ask, “Was there any guilt for causing an innocent boy to suffer?”